This HP Z440 PC was my best purchase this year 

I bought the HP Z440 too. My best computer so far.

I've flipped several z-series workstations over the years, their cases are built for a battlefield and I even cross-fired some low-end GPUs with mixed results. These are excellent value for dollar and decently upgradeable and as you said already VERY quiet...nice vid.

Sandy Bridge through to Haswell are still such a value powerhouse for so many tasks. Apart from Athlon / Duron K7 and Core2Duo, the Sandy/Ivy Bridge/Haswell would have to be amongst my favourite platforms to build.

I love HP workstation hardware. My father had one back in the Pentium 3 days and it was built like a tank.

Love the new format Phil! I was trying to think of why I like this better and I came to the realization it is like going over to your friends house who wants to show you something and you converse face to face for a minute and then you fixate mostly on what they wanted to show you.

Excellent, its the way to go. Never mind blowing thousands on cutting edge gaming pc’s etc.

Nice, I run a HP Z620 that I bought 4 years ago for $500. It was upgraded to dual E5-2667v2 (16 cores) and has the same performance as yours. Has been stable since inception. Workstations are the best bang for the buck out there.

HP has made a lot of solid workstations, great buy!

The early i7 machines were so good that still can be used today for every day tasks… just upgrade ram and migrate to an ssd, they will perform very well. My i7-920 now sits on my wife’s attending clinic… just got a Xeon x5680 as last upgrade. 100% rock solid. Running for 14 years every week day.

Very much worth it! I have one of these with an RX 480 as my main computer now and I love it! 12 core/64gb ram

Just bought mine with the i7-6700 and 16gb of ram for 140 Euros. I'm gonna add a 1660ti from my old computer and a SSD. I am really thrilled 😊

Yes, those workstations are no joke when it comes to quality. You made a really smart choice for your intended use, tremendous value.

My Music and gaming workstation of choice. Quiet and never fails. I learnt my way around BIOS updates etc with this machine. A decent DAC is a great addition to this machine.

I own HP Z440. Quietest computer I've ever owned! I use it for music production and mixing. Super cheap parts, supports nvme booting, crazy amount of usb3 ports. I love this machine! Before Z440 I had a Fujitsu M720 which was also quite nice and quiet, then I got the M740 which was a disappointment - on paper it was supposed to be quieter than M720, but it was actually louder. Plus, there are 2 versions with 2 different motherboards, and unfortunately I got the one which didn't support nvme booting(!)... I also had a Dell T3610 and T5810 for a while, but they were louder than Z440. HP Z440 is the best PC I've ever owned in terms of how smoothly and quietly it performs. I praise this machine to everybody :)

another benefit of that reliability is that they're some of the most available motherboards from their eras. They haven't ballooned in price over time from hardware failures the same way that consumer boards have. You can find one for about 50 bucks by itself.

Used HP Z-series workstations are a really good value. I use a Z420 for live streaming computer repairs from my basement, and had a Z440 for video editing... and I'd still have that Z440 but something happened to the motherboard (and a replacement motherboard was going to cost nearly as much as just buying another used Z440). However, there's a chance that failure was my fault*, and there are a lot of other people successfully using Z440's after their business life was over, so I'm chalking my Z440 experience up as a fluke. And I'm tempted to pick up another Z440 because they're such a good value for a lot of productivity tasks. (* The motherboard stopped working after I removed the video card to move it to another computer. But when I put the drive from the Z440 in another computer to pull the data off of it, I found evidence that the computer may have been asleep - and not OFF - when I pulled the card out.)

Bought a 2nd-hand Z400 (already upgrading back then) from my employer over half a decade ago-- best hundred bucks ever spent, it's now got a 3050 (molex-to-pcie works fine, their psu's are solid!) and still runs everything nice enough today.

A couple of things to point out about the PCIe slots (which I don't think were mentioned): 1) The PCIe slots connected to the CPU (i.e. the two x16 and one x8) can be bifurcated, so with, for example, an ASUS HYPER M.2 x16 card with four NVMe drives in it and you'll be able to use all four drives. I have two of these adapters in mine, and run a Proxmox hypervisor. I'm using two of the drives from the first adapter in a RAID1 for the Proxmox installation and the other two drives for VM storage. Then I'm passing the other 4 drives through to a virtualised TrueNAS installation. Note that you MAY need to update the BIOS to enable PCIe bifurcation though, as I'm not 100% sure if it was a feature that was exposed to users on the early revisions. 2) All the slots are open-ended, meaning you can physically fit a card with an x16 connector in the x8 slot, for example (but it will run with at x8 electrically in this case, so keep that in mind).

As an CAD Administrator working for years with this computers, I can only recoment this machines.

Hey bro, its cool that you quickly explained the hard stuff for the kids. Good vid sir!

I've had my Z440 for about 3yrs now. I recently upgraded it to a E5-1660v4, 64GB RAM & RTX 3060 ti. I like that I can put a full size bluray burner and it has plenty of space for extra drives ang games well. I just got Forza 5 and I can play it @ 1440p & 2160p. The cool thing is I can still upgrade the RAM & CPU further if I want to.

Congrats on that nice system and demonstrations.

My favorite pc hp z440 with built speakers

Imagine slapping a custom high-end motherboard, cooler, GPUs, SSDs and fans in the corporate-looking case. This screams a no-frills vibe!

I love business workstations. They are so modular and super easy to take apart. I've had my hands on very many HP's, Lenovo's, Dell's. It's kind of fun flashing firmware on a computer like this, often times there will be 4 or 5 different firmware's to flash, TPM, ME, BIOS, NIC, GPU....especially workstations they go deep. Another thing, one bad thing about these being so proprietery is if you break something or have a bad mic jack or something, you need the exact parts, they do sell them bare though so you could get all the parts for cheap (i.e. no ram/cpu/etc). I like having spares so I can frankenstein them together, take one with a bad board and make one pretty one.

I love these workstations. We are still using our Z640's at work. Interestingly we have GTX 1080's with 8GB of Vram.

Philday is the cherry on top to the end of the week.

Awesome video. 18 cores is crazy + quad channel. Its like 12 core + triple channel on x58. Tons of value.

love how calm, intelligent and just overall how chilll how is haha

I am a big fan of Z workstations along with Quadro cards. Love the industrial black boxes. Nice video

I don't use it much anymore as I have a 5950X rig for my daily driver, but I bought a refurb Z800 (2xX5650) back around 2015. The RAM eventually died, so it now has only 16GB (rather than the 48GB it came with). Amazing build quality, and I love how you can take the whole thing apart in about 5mins with no tools; hard drives are basically a case of clip into case and slide in -- no plugging cables at all; for SSDs on it I put an IcyDock into one of the 5.25 bays -- it has 6 SATA connectors plus about 8 SAS connectors that double as extra SATA connectors.

I've been using an old HP Z400 for a LONG time with a GTX-970. It's finally getting replaced as soon as my new RAM kit for the new build gets delivered here in a few days but it has been 100% reliable. It was getting tossed out at work so I grabbed it and slid my video card in when my gaming machine died.

As someone who doesn't like the RGB trend in PCs over the past few years that's a pretty good looking machine, particularly when you consider its age too. Its functionally designed but without looking completely dull.

OMG, I've been watching you for years and never actually seen your face. I must say, you look completely different than the guy I had built up in my head haha. Thanks for all the retro videos and amazing website.

Super awesome vid Phil 👌

As someone who dipped his toe into the PC water, back in the Windows 3.1 days, on super socket 7, 'budget' gaming's come an awful long way in three and a bit decades. For that reason, this is - far and away - my favourite 'tech' channel and you have NO idea, how pleased I am that you're here. Kilowatt+ rigs are all very nice and fine - I'm building one - but this 'getting your hands dirty' stuff is where I started and I'm no less excited, than when I was a much younger - and impecunious - geek. Thanks heaps for your great, great content, man!

Nice clean interior 👍

Thank you so much for this video ❤❤🎉

That's a thing of beauty! Very nice!!!

Lovely system! I was gaming on console while my kids were young but now they're up a bit I'm back into my main passion, the PC! Last year I invested in AM4, 5800X paired with an AMD 6900XT and 32gb of ram. It'll probably stay in that configuration for the next 5 years or so lol. Just embarking on a project to resurrect my old Windows 98 rig which I recently found in my parents loft. Going to be fun! Great channel! Love watching 👍

I was able to take a few of these generation HP Z workstations from my work whenever we upgraded to the HP Z8 G4 lineup a couple years ago. I absolutely love the tool less design, the build quality of their chassis, and of course how modular and upgradable they are, not to mention the reliability of the hardware. I'm using one right now as my main system, although just like you, I did drop in a graphics card upgrade, a Radeon RX 580 8GB in my case.

If you ever need to replace or upgrade the power supply, you can buy adapter cables to adapt the proprietary connectors to standard ATX for $15 us.

I really like the Z440, your setup is the same as mine except I use a HP Z Turbo quad pro for the nvme storage

I'm one that loves dual socket workstations. I got a HP Z800 for free in 2020 and upgraded it pretty heavily (went from single X5560, 4GB RAM, and a FX 1800 to dual X5660, 192 GB of RAM, and a GTX 1080 8GB) and used that for about a year. Then in August of last year I picked myself a P920 (Lenovo version of the HP Z8G4) and spent a pretty penny on it. I got myself dual Xeon Gold 6144, 256 GB DDR4, and carried over my 1080. Fun fact, one Xeon Gold 6144 beats both X5660 processors in benchmarks.

The powerbutton on the back is a psu reset button 😆

effing awesome video once more, phil just wish the case was a bit smaller more "optiplex" (yeah, I know) oriented.

Interesting system, like!

So nice to finally see you in person.

Still running x99 platform with E5-2650v3 + GTX 1070 here, best bang for the bucks for compatibilities, expansion (tons of PCIe slot) and dirt cheap multicore CPUs, and much more, good cheap system for experiment/homelab use, even some gaming.

Nice video Phil! The office building i work close to is moving and they where trowing out 10 computers. I picked them up and one of them was a HP Z440 with E5 1620v3, 32gb ddr4 ecc, 1 tb hdd and quadro K620. After 3 duds (Phenom x2 220 and I5-650) i came over that one!

Another benefit I've noticed upgrading my X79 setup from a 3930K to a Xeon E5-2667v2 was how cool it runs overall, pair it with a cool running gfx card and you'll have a whisper quiet machine that's still fairly powerful today. I run this as my 2nd machine with Linux and it's butter smooth and reliable that's able to play games very well, the bonus ball as well, that with a compatible gfx card installed I can run any OS from XP to 10 as well as Linux with full driver support.

Have a z230 with a Xeon e3-1231 v3 (closest consumer chip I can think of is the 4770 but no iGPU ) 16GB of DDR3 1600 and an RX 480 4gb, does really good for most games only the more recent AAA games seem to give it any trouble.

That workstation is impressive. I have an older xw4400 workstation I was hoping to turn into a home NAS, but I then found out it runs off DDR2 memory to show the age of the PC. The only NAS software I managed to get working reliably was Unraid but that requires a system with DDR3 memory which is a shame, so I have an old gaming PC as the home NAS now. I could probably turn the xw4400 into a Windows XP era retro gaming PC if I really wanted to but currently I'm not sure what I'll do with it. The Z440 was really impressive though. I loved the feature that unused PCI-e power connectors plug into dull sockets just to keep them out of the way and not be loose inside the case.

My brother found a "HP Z800" if I remember the model number correctly, but the proprietary 1250 watt power supply wasn't working. It had dual Xeons and I think 24GB ECC RAM. We bought a replacement power supply for around $200, but it was risky as looking up that model we found that the PSU's are prone to blow up, we got one anyway and all seemed okay. I hadn't had the time to put an SSD inside and install Windows yet, but every now and then I would do something, like run a RAM test, run WindowToGo on a USB, but maybe used 5 times. Months later I'm about to set it all up be removing one of my older SATA SSD's from my PC that was running in RAID 0, and reinstalled my own PC with one SATA only. I go to turn on the HP z800 and "BOOOM!!!"💥💥💥.....the PSU popped......oh well. I should've went the route of buying a normal ATX PSU, hanging it outside on top and just using an adapter for it connected to the proprietary connector to the motherboard.

I bought an HP XW4400 workstation, refurbished, directly from HP in 2008. I just retired it a few weeks ago as my primary work/play machine for a newer computer - another refurb HP workstation. Never had anything go bad on it except a RAM module (which I think was one I had added). I couple cycles of updates over the years and I eventually had it at 'full spec' with a Core 2 Quad Extreme CPU and 8GB ram. With a couple SSDs and (eventually) a GT 1050 (I think) it was very quick and I was able to play any game most games I was interested in. It ran Crysis smooth as butter, along with a lot of other games too.

Hi Phill, got the same Box since Januar with 8 cores and 16 threads, 128gb RAM an all SSD + my old RTX3060...and its awesome. Can only recommand it.

I have run x99 CPUs with the motherboard turbo unlock. Unfortunately with the E5-2699 v3 the turbo unlock doesn't do much with so many cores. 😂. 12 cores on the E5-2678 v3 seems the to be the limit. Can't beat the price on that many cheap cores on the 2699v3. Avoid the 2678v3 the price has gone through the roof (unleas you need DDR3) and go with a 2680v3.

@7:00 No, that's bad math. 720p is 1Mpixel, 1080p is 2.1 Mpixel, 1440p is 3.7Mpixel and 4K is 8.3 Mpixel but it doesn't scale like that, as we're also dealing with different texture sizes at higher resolutions, more detail, more shadows, more everything... at 720p lots of things can be hidden or not rendered and lower texture sizes can be used without user noticing. A card with only 4 GB vram may have issues doing 4K because game will fill the vram and you get less performance due to constant swapping between card memory and system memory, unless you reduce video quality.

"Does it run Crysis?" Classic

I find that Office-PC's are completely underrated. My PC is a Dell OptiPlex 3010MT. I pushed it to the maximum with an i7-3770 and 16GB RAM. On top of that he got 2TB SSD, GTX960, a beQuiet!-PSU (500W) and some Noctua-Fans. I can use it to play older games on high settings and newer ones on medium settings.

Those HP boxes are great. Reliable

I have an HPZ400. It's a different platform using an x58 chipset. Bought it because I like to have a variety of different platforms from different eras. Came with 24 GB ram (6x4GB modules/uses triple channel),a dual core 2.53 Westmere CPU, gtx 9800, 2 optical drives and a single 500GB hdd. Only cost me $50 (Australian), which I was more than happy with. I upgraded it to an x5690 cpu (3.46ghz 6 core/12 thread), but apart from that left it as I bought it. Just out of curiosity I temporarily put in an "old" gtx1080ti I head lying around to see what it can do, and I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised. For how old it is it can still do pretty well with a lot of games. The biggest surprise was that it runs AROS without issue (open source AmigaOS compatible OS), which has limited hardware support. The 1080ti doesnt work with AROS, but the 9800gtx it came with does. The HPZ400 is now my AROS box. I have both Ryzen 9 5900x and i9-13900k based systems, both of which are great for their purposes, but there's just something about machines that are aging that still have a little bit of raw grunt that I really enjoy. I think a big part of it is that modern hardware just works well with no need to tinker or experiment whereas these sorts of machines can hold a few surprises at times.

10:29 oh thank god. I was anxious we wouldn't know the Crysis benchmarks!

ex office machines are great value, i particular love the micro usff pcs (dell micro, lenovo tiny, hp mini, etc) that are smaller than your average modem, lower power consumption, regular socket cpus (usually with a 35W power limit) and cheap so-dim ram - perfect systems for servers, or general desktop machines, much better value than a pricey nuc - ebay is flooded with them, they are great for anything you don't need a dedicated gpu for however if you don't care about size and power efficiency the bigger systems are even better value

THANK YOU. I think that these refurbished computers, especially the workstations and the ThinkPads are the best. I bought a ThinkStation E31 and a ThinkPad T430 just as the pandemic was hitting. I paid $200 Canadian for the ThinkStation, tax, shipping, everything. I use it for a media server. It has 8 tuner cards, 1 SSD and 10 spinning hard drives attached to it. It has run 24/7 recording TV and cutting out commercials for nearly 3 years now. It is so quiet, I have to put my ear to it to hear it running. ThinkPads are great too. People have run those over with their cars and they've barely been scuffed. This is what I'm buying from now on.

both my home labs, and my offices are full of Dell T3600s (2011v1) and T5810s (2011v3). I've refurbed a bunch of them for clients for budget work stations. In Homelab2, my office workstation is a Dell T3600 with Xeon E5-1660, 32GB, 1TB Crucial P3 NVME, RX5600XT, under it sits my main server, which is a T5810 with an E-52690v3, its the main server since this location has the best internet to punch out to share plex, and access it when working somewhere onsite.

Nice rig and excellent value. These workstations are great for virtualisation projects with all of those cores. I reckon a nvidia 3060 or amd 5700xt would be a good match for the gaming part. 3060 would also have a fast video encoder too

I had to build a 3D rendering farm on a budget and went with this platform. I bought two Z840s and a single Z640. Got used processors on ebay for very cheap (2X 2698v4, 2X 2697v4, 2X 2695V4) for a total of 112 cores. The farm can achieve a combined Cinebench score of around 80,000 and it has been a game changer for my production output.

These workstations are still very useful. I have 2 of the z420's. One has an e5-2690v2 with 10 cores, 20 threads, 128GB ram, and I run esxi on it for a home lab.

So, Haswell still has some life. Other than the proprietary connectors, This PC is nice. Paying little money for a new (old) PC or upgrades is awesome.

Great Video

Awesome review! Thanks so much for this look at the older HP workstation. I bought one of these because of your review and it's a beast. Handles everything I throw at it including video editing with ease. Have you checked into any with dual cpu?

We used Z840 workstations to plan radio Neurosurgery at my hospital. They’re very reliable machines indeed. One thing I’d have to comment on the gaming tests is why use ultra settings in 720p. I believe medium or high at 1080p is a better performance indicator imho

i got the HP Z820 and hot-rodded it, it has the dual Xeon E5-2687W@3.10 GHz + watercool system from HP, the 1150W PSU module, 64GB of DDR3 1600MHz RAM, a SAS SSD from Huawei of 4 TB, 2x4TB mechanical hard drives and for boot drive, since it doesn't support NVMe (because it was released before the standard got published), i used a refurbrished Intel DC P3600 PCie SSD of 1.6TB, and cherry on top, an RTX 3060 12GB from Gigabyte and i use it as my daily driver, a bit power hungry sure, but very reliable.

3:26 - to tell you the truth, I've never seen a physical x8 PCI EXPRESS slot in person. Although I have a motherboard with half the pins x16 slot ☺️. Anyway, that's an awesome machine! Thanks for the video, Phil 🍉😉👍!

I'm a real sucker for Haswell, it's a fantastic platform that gets overshadowed by Ivy Bridge. The workstation variants are even better. I love my whitebox systems but there's really something to be said for these overengineered workstations; once you understand how to service them its really hard to go back to cable managing with velcro ties. And as much crap as we give HP, Dell and others, they continue to make device drivers available; not necessarily updating them in 2022 of course, but that you are able to find good tested, working sets to bring a machine up from scratch. The cases also look fantastic and include 5.25" expansion bays, perfect for 'retrofitting'.

I like workstations in general. They usually are very reliable, no nonsense and well-designed. I went with the Dell Precision line with the T3600, 5810, 5820 and recently the 7875 with AMD Threadripper. Some have been bought secondhand and in all cases I made sure it has a strong power supply. I save some money by going with a gaming graphics card instead of a professional Quadro/FirePro. Still, these systems are quite expensive. But I don't mind paying something extra for reliability and on-site warranty service.

I had a Lenovo ThinkStation S30 and this thing was built like a tank, but I sold it off since the motherboard started developing some problems with booting and not detecting drives properly. Flashed the BIOS, new CR2032 battery, swapped SATA cables for known good ones and still problems persisted, perhaps the SATA controller was on it's way out. For the money it returned me with a RX470D inside, I went 12th Gen and I don't regret it. I built a really efficient system for my needs - mainly office work, RAW photo development and editing, little gaming on the side. Compared to Sandy and Ivy Bridge it's so much snappier.

I always like the workstation stuff- they still have a bit of the overbuild quality you would have expected in the 70s or so. I bought a used IBM Thinkstation from 2013 and used it as my main work PC for years- and that PC is still in use and is also still on the level of a mid level laptop. The nvidea Quadro GPUs seem to be prone to breaking though- all the ones I got used died eventually

Phil always upload right as my breakfast is ready. Coincidence? I think not. Cheers, Phil!

I love the HP Z 4xx Workstations :)

Finally i get to see Phil in video😁

I still have a 8440w kicking around just because HP workstation class stuff is so nice. I never really use it anymore because it's so hot and loud, it's heavy and the battery life is appalling but it's just so well built and it has EVERY option including a BD drive :)

Finally its good to see your face

I bought a Xeon based Z240 myself a while ago from an auction and it's unbelievable how much performance you can get from a PC that I paid less than 200€ for shipped to my door. You can definitely tell it's not your typical consumer PC when you take the side panel off Only let down by the K2200 GPU that is installed on mine but the Xeon is a beast, friend has a 2011 Vaio laptop that is horribly slow and I felt bad for him so I had to get him something on a tight budget and if he ever decides to game more it's going to be a beast of a rig with a simple GPU swap

Looking to get some more of these. Currently using Z640 to run a 3 node Kubernetes cluster - under FreeBSD ! Want to setup another cheap one just as a dedicated docker build box, and maybe another one as a CI runner. Not that I need > 1 ... but at this price, may as well get a few, then I have redundancy for ages oh - probably need 1 more, to live test windows builds, since I dont actually have a windows machine anywhere on the homestead

I run a 10 year old xeon chip with 32gb of ddr3 as my pc. Board can except 64 or even 128 if I update the bios. Still working great I did upgrade my graphics card this year from a 4gb gtx 680 to a 8gb amd 6600 something blanking on exact model.

I built my daughter a gaming pc using this as the base. Just make sure is has the E5-1650 v4 CPU, thats the only one really worth it.

got a z440 motherboard, a converter cable for the psu and an e5 2667 v3, for round about 90$ and an extra shipping fee of maybe 30$. Also bought 4x 16gb of sk hynix for 10$ each, an aliexpress rx5700xt as gpu, arctic gaming cooler. And put all of that into a coolermaster haf 500 case white ed. running linux mint. love the thing.

A vendor where I work replaced a Z440 with something new not long ago. Was able to acquire it for free. Looks like I can upgrade the CPU to a E5-1650V4 for 25 dollars. Not sure what I want to do with it yet, but it seems solid for what it is.

Nice. I've got a 2697v3 (got it for $30 from a server) in my WS with 64G. Try the Turbo Boost Bios.

Got a z220 for pretty cheap a while back, i7 3770, 8gb ram, and came with a 600 watt power supply. I added 2 ssds in raid 0 to make up for the lake of nvme lol. Worked pretty well... Until I had to sell it.

I bought a Z220 on Ebay for $100 5 years ago. I was so impressed with it that I bought a Z440 just over a year ago. It has an E5-1650 v4, 32GB Ram and a brand new HP 3060ti that was $40+ cheaper than the lowest priced "name brand". I boot from an HP Z-Turbo G2 card. It also has an SSD, 2 HDs, and the 700w PS. This is the most trouble free machine I have ever owned.

I have a slightly older z400 with dual x5650 CPUs and WOW! It make Zero noise! I have a 1u rack with similar specs that sounds like a jumbo jet so I was amazed that the workstation doesn't make a peep of sound

I got a z6xx for free at work, 2 years ago, I just upgraded with a rx470. This is still my daily machine today, and xeon cpu are really got for PCem emulating up to old pentium 2 400mhz machine. I fulfill it with SSDs and 2 larges HDD for storages.

Nice case those HP workstations.

I think i am a little bit to late but ok... Sorry for my english by the way, its not the best. But i have to tell something about the graphicscard (especially for Gaming). I use the Z440 with an RTX 3060 an i love it. The PSU is the 750W and the CPU is the E5-1630 v3. With this compilation i get in several games over 90 FPS avg in 3440x1440! I can recommend this workstation to everyone.

Ahh face reveal!! I don't think I could use HP as my personal machine, I deal with them too much at work. Their documentation is really good.

I'm surprised Haswell still holds up quite well, even being 8 years old by now.

Awesome video. I'd like to see what this machine can do with a more powerful gpu.